Hyatt Foundation announced that Toyo Ito is the 2013 recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an annual award which recognizes “a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.”
First is a retail project that was cited by the jury, and one of the first projects of Ito’s that I came across as an architecture student. It’s the Tod’s store in Omotesando, which you can see in the photos above. The structure of the project is also the skin: a graphic and concrete abstraction of trees that wraps around the exterior of the building that simply looks stunning.
